Commissioned by the City of Munich, the GEMA Foundation and the Franz Grothe
Foundation

Production by the Munich Biennale, in collaboration
with Büro Staubach, Berlin and Art+Com Medientechnologie und Gestaltung AG
Berlin, and with the support of Simon Penny, Jamieson Schulte and the Electronic
Studio of the Technical University of Berlin.

Sponsored by funds from the
Bavarian Theater Prize 2000.

Summary

Christopher Marlowe’s drama provided the subject matter for
André Werner’s opera. The composer condensed the text, so that the main plot
lines are highlighted: the relationship between the three monotheistic world
religions and their intertwinements with power and politics. Werner also
rearranged the sequence of the scenes, and thus the plot does not unfold in a
linear fashion. Instead there is a system of anticipations, references, cross
references and flashbacks. Machiavelli, who only speaks the prologue in
Marlowe’s play, constantly intervenes in the course of the events as the
“director” in Werner’s opera. He also controls the virtual stage sets in the
beginning, which are as well as the costumes created by means of projections,
but he loses control over the virtual stage more and more during the course of
the opera.

Full Text

Christopher Marlowe's drama from the year 1593 provides the
subject matter for André Werner's chamber opera – a realistic, violent story.
The governor of Malta and his grandees expropriate Barabbas, a wealthy Jewish
merchant, because the city is unable to pay on its own the horrendous tribute
the Turkish sultan demands. They turn the merchant's estate into a nunnery.
Afterwards Barabbas' beautiful daughter Abigail sets foot on the property two
more times: the first time in order to rescue hidden valuables, and the second
time as a repentant, converted Catholic. The Spanish vice admiral, an envoy of
the "Catholic King," advises the Maltese to not pay the tribute and to use the
funds to finance a war against the Turks. Barabbas gets his revenge by guiding
the sultan's troops into the city through a secret tunnel. In gratitude the
victors appoint him governor. But Barabbas makes the suggestion to his now
powerless predecessor that he should organize a coup against the Muslim
occupation forces. But then the (former and new) Christian governor tricks him
and he falls into the kettle of boiling water he had intended to use for the
Ottoman army commander, the crown prince. Marlowe has his prologue spoken by a
person who specialized in the philosophy of power: Giacomo
Machiavelli.

Marlowe not only paints a clear portrait of his era from a
precise, blatant viewpoint, but with a clarity that has no equal. He sheds a
light on the general intertwinement of power and religion, and of the doctrine
of salvation and political force, which is usually exercised in the dead of
night. The drama was destined to produce controversy – at the time he wrote it,
but also in subsequent times, up until the present day. The philosopher of these
principles of power was Giacomo Machiavelli. He attained, unlike the others who
moved in the wake or in the countercurrents of his writings, that the analysis
of an evil prevented that evil from spreading.

André Werner wrote the
libretto for his opera himself and based it on Eduard von Bülow's German
translation of the Marlowe play. He did not choose any of the modernized
translations. But he streamlined and concentrated the drama, and in doing so he
highlighted the central plot lines and the central conflicts in the
text.

"The comparison of three world religions, their power-political
implications and their inherent mutual exclusion of each other form the basic
elements in the stageplay by Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare,
and this drama is the starting point for the chamber opera Marlowe: The Jew of
Malta.

In my concept Machiavelli (almost a contemporary of Marlowe's!) –
in the original play he doesn't appear again after his prologue – becomes the
central "founder of worlds" and director, who over and over again interferes and
directs the regulations of the experiment he initiated, an experiment having to
do with religions and the acquisition of power, and in the end he is forced to
relinquish his control over the events." (André Werner)

André Werner has
not only shortened Marlowe's/ von Bülow's version and condensed it, he has also
partially changed the order of the scenes. Excerpts from the beginning of the
drama are placed at the end, and vice versa. Therefore the plot does not unfold
in a linear fashion, but rather in a complex fashion, by means of anticipation
and flashbacks, unfolding so to speak in the sphere of time, and we are in the
center of this sphere. The Machiavelli character is present throughout the
entire opera. The texts of his "resets," which he uses to squeeze himself in
between the scenes of the other characters, evolve from fragments of his
prologue and from building blocks of the other roles, which are influenced and
directed by him. Their logic of language is not developed in a linear fashion as
well, but rather it takes on meaning by cross-references and flashback
references. Language breaks into pieces and loses the consistency of meaning
already in the prologue. Perhaps it can be understood as being still
associative, gestural or musical.

The process of the disintegration of
meaning in language overlaps with another process: Machiavelli takes over
passages that Marlowe assigned to other roles. He is and he becomes intertwined
with the events – at first he is the "director," but then he becomes a slave of
the same system he thinks he is superior to.

An actor and a countertenor
portray Machiavelli, in principal omnipresent, in André Werner's opera. The four
female vocalists alternately perform all of the other roles, the female as well
as the male roles. There is no set assignment of voices and roles. The
performers receive their visible individuality as characters in the play by
means of projected costumes, and not by the "neutral" costume they have on.
Their role is imposed on them externally, at first by Machiavelli.

The
events in André Werner's chamber opera take place in "a sketched nunnery, which
has the decisive quality of an architecture that constantly changes – thus the
space exists exactly in the moment of its transformation.” The stage projection,
of course, is not based on historical realism, but rather it uses the cloister
as a metaphor for character, style, effect and exposure value of the space. By
working with certain surfaces of intersection the virtual architecture manages,
for example, to show exterior and interior views of a room simultaneously, to
turn the rooms as if the viewer were moving within the rooms, and to change
perspectives and keep them in motion.

“In order to translate this
aesthetic ideal, here traditional music theater is interwoven with the use of
state-of-the-art electronic means in a very precise manner: In addition to the
use of a chamber orchestra and vocals, an artificial, "virtual" stage topography
is created for the stage, and this stage topography is dependent upon the
performers and musicians and is subject to constant change under the control of
the participants. The respective stage setting is created and projected by the
computers in real-time, and in the following moment it is replaced by yet
another variation.

Whereas in the first part of the opera the Machiavelli
character directs and influences 'his' virtual world, the real-time generated
stage architecture (towards the end of the composition the chamber orchestra
will be included in the events on the stage via microphone pick-ups) and the
musical structures written into the score will take over the control of the
stage settings (i.e., the computer), and thus 'dethrone' Machiavelli with regard
to the contents of the opera." (André Werner)